First Novel by Nicholas Royle

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Nicholas Royle's First Novel is metafiction — and it is an extremely good example of the formConrad Williams

John Burnside

Published at 12:01AM, December 29 2012

First Novel by Nicholas Royle is not Royle’s first novel. Nor, in spite
of the rather witty dust jacket, is it published as an original paperback by
Picador in their old “clean white spine with plain black lettering” style.
Its central character is a one-time novelist named Paul Kinder, who spends
his days scouring second-hand bookshops in search of first (or preferably,
only) novels by a variety of writers both known and forgotten; he also clips
writers’ rooms articles from “the review section of a national broadsheet”
and, like the author of First Novel, he teaches creative writing at a